My Holiday Blog Post 1/15-17

Back from our desert sojourn.  Our friends have a house in Rancho Mirage and they invited 5 of us to come out for the 3 day weekend and enjoy the desert.  Every time we go they plan something different for us to do.  This time we went to the homes/legacy of two prominent pioneers of this area - William Keys and Cabot Yerxa .  They were colorful characters and it was very interesting learning about them.   Here is a saguaro cactus we took a picture of during our trip.  As we had a late start on Saturday, we drove through Morongo Valley and Yucca Valley to get to the Joshua Tree National Park Visitor's Center and on the way we passed this wonderful saguaro speciment!  It's right there in the middle of town. These take years and years to get this size, so we were thrilled to see them.  At Cabot's museum we found some more.  These are even taller.  Some day I'd like to go to the Saguaro National Park in Southern Arizona where there are many, many of these.  They have these beautiful white blossoms.

This n That #1

We're leaving tomorrow for a 3 day visit to Palm Springs, so not much quilting is getting done.  I did hem a curtain for my DDIL in CO so she can try out how they hang and what length she wants them (got it off in the mail, too), finished my secret block (more on that later) and  unstitched my 4 inchers to replace the large block.  So I'm leaving you with a photo or two:

 Here's Alan at 2 months.  Last weigh - in said 7.9 pounds so he's right up there where he should be if he had been born Dec 20th instead of Nov. 11th. He's so precious!

Then here's a scrappy quilt tip - when I'm making a scrappy quilt I use left over thread and partly filled bobbins to sew them together.  If the quilt is most one color - I'll try to use color in that family, but for truly scrappy quilts, it's whatever partial thread is on hand for blocks making AND quilting.

First UFO Done

I'm ready to start on another ufo for the UFO challenge.  Yes, ufo #6 is done and will be gifted to Riverside Life Services.  I may not be so lucky next month as this one only needed quilting and binding to be finished, and it was 36"square.  My guardian angel was visiting MO when Vince pulled #6 from the bag to keep me enthused by not having to work on a bigger challenge on the first month.

I found this block in a picture in a Connecting Threads catalog.  I was intrigued enough with it that I sat down and figured out how to put it together.  Wish I had jotted down the name of the book it was in.  Whoever you were, thanks for this design.

I took large scraps from my stash and made the backing, so maybe I should consider this a 2 sided quilt.  I like how the quilting shows up on both sides too.